What is Coming? by H. G. Wells

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Let us first consider the case for Poland. The way to a reunited Poland
seems to me a particularly difficult one. The perplexity arises out of
the crime of the original partition; whichever side emerges with an
effect of victory must needs give up territory if an autonomous Poland
is to reappear. A victorious Germany would probably reconstitute the
Duchy of Warsaw under a German prince; an entirely victorious Russia
would probably rejoin Posen to Russian Poland and the Polish fragment of
Galicia, and create a dependent Polish kingdom under the Tsar. Neither
project would be received with unstinted delight by the Poles, but
either would probably be acceptable to a certain section of them.
Disregarding the dim feelings of the peasantry, Austrian Poland would
probably be the most willing to retain a connection with its old rulers.
The Habsburgs have least estranged the Poles. The Cracow district is the
only section of Poland which has been at all reconciled to foreign
control; it is the most autonomous and contented of the fragments.

It is doubtful how far national unanimity is any longer possible between
the three Polish fragments. Like most English writers, I receive a
considerable amount of printed matter from various schools of Polish
patriotism, and wide divergences of spirit and intention appear. A weak,
divided and politically isolated Poland of twelve or fifteen million
people, under some puppet adventurer king set up between the
Hohenzollerns and the Tsardom, does not promise much happiness for the
Poles or much security for the peace of the world. An entirely
independent Poland will be a feverish field of international
intrigue--intrigue to which the fatal Polish temperament lends itself
all too readily; it may be a battlefield again within five-and-twenty
years. I think, if I were a patriotic Pole, I should determine to be a
Slav at any cost, and make the best of Russia; ally myself with all her
liberal tendencies, and rise or fall with her. And I should do my utmost
in a field where at present too little has been done to establish
understandings and lay the foundations of a future alliance with the
Czech-Slovak community to the south. But, then, I am not a Pole, but a
Western European with a strong liking for the Russians. I am democratic
and scientific, and the Poles I have met are Catholic and aristocratic
and romantic, and all sorts of difficult things that must make
co-operation with them on the part of Russians, Ruthenian peasants,
Czechs, and, indeed, other Poles, slow and insecure. I doubt if either
Germany or Russia wants to incorporate more Poles--Russia more
particularly, which has all Siberia over which to breed Russians--and I
am inclined to think that there is a probability that the end of this
war may find Poland still divided, and with boundary lines running
across her not materially different from those of 1914. That is, I
think, an undesirable probability, but until the Polish mind qualifies
its desire for absolute independence with a determination to orient
itself definitely to some larger political mass, it remains one that has
to be considered.

But the future of Poland is not really separate from that of the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy, nor is that again to be dealt with apart from
that of the Balkans. From Danzig to the Morea there runs across Europe a
series of distinctive peoples, each too intensely different and national
to be absorbed and assimilated by either of their greater neighbours,
Germany or Russia, and each relatively too small to stand securely
alone. None have shaken themselves free from monarchical traditions;
each may become an easy prey to dynastic follies and the aggressive
obsessions of diplomacy. Centuries of bloody rearrangement may lie
before this East Central belt of Europe.

To the liberal idealist the thought of a possible Swiss system or group
of Swiss systems comes readily to mind. One thinks of a grouping of
groups of Republics, building up a United States of Eastern Europe. But
neither Hohenzollerns nor Tsar would welcome that. The arm of democratic
France is not long enough to reach to help forward such a development,
and Great Britain is never sure whether she is a "Crowned Republic" or a
Germanic monarchy. Hitherto in the Balkans she has lent her influence
chiefly to setting up those treacherous little German kings who have
rewarded her so ill. The national monarchs of Serbia and Montenegro have
alone kept faith with civilisation. I doubt, however, if Great Britain
will go on with that dynastic policy. She herself is upon the eve of
profound changes of spirit and internal organisation. But whenever one
thinks of the possibilities of Republican development in Europe as an
outcome of this war, it is to realise the disastrous indifference of
America to the essentials of the European situation. The United States
of America could exert an enormous influence at the close of the war in
the direction of a liberal settlement and of liberal institutions....
They will, I fear, do nothing of the sort.

It is here that the possibility of some internal change in Germany
becomes of such supreme importance. The Hohenzollern Imperialism towers
like the black threat of a new Caesarism over all the world. It may
tower for some centuries; it may vanish to-morrow. A German revolution
may destroy it; a small group of lunacy commissioners may fold it up and
put it away. But should it go, it would at least take with it nearly
every crown between Hamburg and Constantinople. The German kings would
vanish like a wisp of smoke. Suppose a German revolution and a
correlated step forward towards liberal institutions on the part of
Russia, then the whole stage of Eastern Europe would clear as fever goes
out of a man. This age of international elbowing and jostling, of
intrigue and diplomacy, of wars, massacres, deportations _en masse_, and
the continual fluctuation of irrational boundaries would come to an end
forthwith.

So sweeping a change is the extreme possibility. The probability is of
something less lucid and more prosaic; of a discussion of diplomatists;
of patched arrangements. But even under these circumstances the whole
Eastern European situation is so fluid and little controlled by any
plain necessity, that there will be enormous scope for any individual
statesman of imagination and force of will.

There have recently been revelations, more or less trustworthy, of
German schemes for a rearrangement of Eastern Europe. They implied a
German victory. Bohemia, Poland, Galicia and Ruthenia were to make a
Habsburg-ruled State from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Jugo-Slav and
the Magyar were to be linked (uneasy bedfellows) into a second kingdom,
also Habsburg ruled; Austria was to come into the German Empire as a
third Habsburg dukedom or kingdom; Roumania, Bulgaria and Greece were to
continue as independent Powers, German ruled. Recently German proposals
published in America have shown a disposition to admit the claims of
Roumania to the Wallachian districts of Transylvania.

Evidently the urgent need to create kingdoms or confederations larger
than any such single States as the natural map supplies, is manifest to
both sides. If Germany, Italy and Russia can come to any sort of general
agreement in these matters, their arrangements will be a matter of
secondary importance to the Western Allies--saving our duty to Serbia
and Montenegro and their rulers. Russia may not find the German idea of
a Polish _plus_ Bohemian border State so very distasteful, provided that
the ruler is not a German; Germany may find the idea still tolerable if
the ruler is not the Tsar.

The destiny of the Serbo-Croatian future lies largely in the hands of
Italy and Bulgaria. Bulgaria was not in this war at the beginning, and
she may not be in it at the end. Her King is neither immortal nor
irreplaceable. Her desire now must be largely to retain her winnings in
Macedonia, and keep the frontier posts of a too embracing Germany as far
off as possible. She has nothing to gain and much to fear from Roumania
and Greece. Her present relations with Turkey are unnatural. She has
everything to gain from a prompt recovery of the friendship of Italy and
the sea Powers. A friendly Serbo-Croatian buffer State against Germany
will probably be of equal comfort in the future to Italy and Bulgaria;
more especially if Italy has pushed down the Adriatic coast along the
line of the former Venetian possessions. Serbia has been overrun, but
never were the convergent forces of adjacent interests so clearly in
favour of her recuperation. The possibility of Italy and that strange
Latin outlier, Roumania, joining hands through an allied and friendly
Serbia must be very present in Italian thought. The allied conception of
the land route from the West and America to Bagdad and India is by Mont
Cenis, Trieste, Serbia and Constantinople, as their North European line
to India is through Russia by Baku.

And that brings us to Constantinople.

Constantinople is not a national city; it is now, and it has always
been, an artificial cosmopolis, and Constantinople and the Dardanelles
are essentially the gate of the Black Sea. It is to Russia that the
waterway is of supreme importance. Any other Power upon it can strangle
Russia; Russia, possessing it, is capable of very little harm to any
other country.

Roumania is the next most interested country. But Roumania can reach up
the Danube and through Bulgaria, Serbia or Hungary to the outer world.
Her greatest trade will always be with Central Europe. For generations
the Turks held Thrace and Anatolia before they secured Constantinople.
The Turk can exist without Constantinople; he is at his best outside
Constantinople; the fall of Constantinople was the beginning of his
decay. He sat down there and corrupted. His career was at an end. I
confess that I find a bias in my mind for a Russian ownership of
Constantinople. I think that if she does not get it now her gravitation
towards it in the future will be so great as to cause fresh wars.
Somewhere she must get to open sea, and if it is not through
Constantinople then her line must lie either through a dependent Armenia
thrust down to the coast of the Levant or, least probable and least
desirable of all, through the Persian Gulf. The Constantinople route is
the most natural and least controversial of these. With the dwindling of
the Turkish power, the Turks at Constantinople become more and more like
robber knights levying toll at the pass. I can imagine Russia making
enormous concessions in Poland, for example, accepting retrocessions,
and conceding autonomy, rather than foregoing her ancient destiny upon
the Bosphorus. I believe she will fight on along the Black Sea coast
until she gets there.

This, I think, is Russia's fundamental end, without which no peace is
worth having, as the liberation of Belgium and the satisfaction of
France is the fundamental end of Great Britain, and Trieste-Fiume is the
fundamental end of Italy.

But for all the lands that lie between Constantinople and West Prussia
there are no absolutely fundamental ends; that is the land of _quid pro
quo_; that is where the dealing will be done. Serbia must be restored
and the Croats liberated; sooner or later the south Slav state will
insist upon itself; but, except for that, I see no impossibility in the
German dream of three kingdoms to take the place of Austro-Hungary, nor
even in a southward extension of the Hohenzollern Empire to embrace the
German one of the three. If the Austrians have a passion for Prussian
"kultur," it is not for us to restrain it. Austrian, Saxon, Bavarian,
Hanoverian and Prussian must adjust their own differences. Hungary would
be naturally Habsburg; is, in fact, now essentially Habsburg, more
Habsburg than Austria, and essentially anti-Slav. Her gravitation to the
Central Powers seems inevitable.

Whether the Polish-Czech combination would be a Habsburg kingdom at all
is another matter. Only if, after all, the Allies are far less
successful than they have now every reason to hope would that become
possible.

The gravitation of that west Slav state to the Central European system
or to Russia will, I think, be the only real measure of ultimate success
or failure in this war. I think it narrows down to that so far as Europe
is concerned. Most of the other things are inevitable. Such, it seems to
me, is the most open possibility in the European map in the years
immediately before us.

If by dying I could assure the end of the Hohenzollern Empire to-morrow
I would gladly do it. But I have, as a balancing prophet, to face the
high probability of its outliving me for some generations. It is to me
a deplorable probability. Far rather would I anticipate Germany quit of
her eagles and Hohenzollerns, and ready to take her place as the leading
Power of the United States of Europe.

X. THE UNITED STATES, FRANCE, BRITAIN, AND RUSSIA

Section 1

In this chapter I propose to speculate a little about the future
development of these four great States, whose destinies are likely to be
much more closely interwoven than their past histories have been. I
believe that the stars in their courses tend to draw these States
together into a dominant peace alliance, maintaining the peace of the
world. There may be other stars in that constellation, Italy, Japan, a
confederated Latin America, for example; I do not propose to deal with
that possibility now, but only to dwell upon the development of
understandings and common aims between France, Russia, and the
English-speaking States.

They have all shared one common experience during the last two years;
they have had an enormous loss of self-sufficiency. This has been
particularly the case with the United States of America. At the
beginning of this war, the United States were still possessed by the
glorious illusion that they were aloof from general international
politics, that they needed no allies and need fear no enemies, that they
constituted a sort of asylum from war and all the bitter stresses and
hostilities of the old world. Themselves secure, they could intervene
with grim resolution to protect their citizens all over the world. Had
they not bombarded Algiers?...

I remember that soon after the outbreak of the war I lunched at the
Savoy Hotel in London when it was crammed with Americans suddenly swept
out of Europe by the storm. My host happened to be a man of some
diplomatic standing, and several of them came and talked to him. They
were full of these old-world ideas of American immunity. Their
indignation was comical even at the time. Some of them had been hustled;
some had lost their luggage in Germany. When, they asked, was it to be
returned to them? Some seemed to be under the impression that, war or no
war, an American tourist had a perfect right to travel about in the
Vosges or up and down the Rhine just as he thought fit. They thought he
had just to wave a little American flag, and the referee would blow a
whistle and hold up the battle until he had got by safely. One family
had actually been careering about in a cart--their automobile
seized--between the closing lines of French and Germans, brightly
unaware of the disrespect of bursting shells for American
nationality.... Since those days the American nation has lived
politically a hundred years.

The people of the United States have shed their delusion that there is
an Eastern and a Western hemisphere, and that nothing can ever pass
between them but immigrants and tourists and trade, and realised that
this world is one round globe that gets smaller and smaller every decade
if you measure it by day's journeys. They are only going over the lesson
the British have learnt in the last score or so of years. This is one
world and bayonets are a crop that spreads. Let them gather and seed, it
matters not how far from you, and a time will come when they will be
sticking up under your nose. There is no real peace but the peace of the
whole world, and that is only to be kept by the whole world resisting
and suppressing aggression wherever it arises. To anyone who watches the
American Press, this realisation has been more and more manifest. From
dreams of aloofness and ineffable superiority, America comes round very
rapidly to a conception of an active participation in the difficult
business of statecraft. She is thinking of alliances, of throwing her
weight and influence upon the side of law and security. No longer a
political Thoreau in the woods, a sort of vegetarian recluse among
nations, a being of negative virtues and unpremeditated superiorities,
she girds herself for a manly part in the toilsome world of men.

So far as I can judge, the American mind is eminently free from any
sentimental leaning towards the British. Americans have a traditional
hatred of the Hanoverian monarchy, and a democratic disbelief in
autocracy. They are far more acutely aware of differences than
resemblances. They suspect every Englishman of being a bit of a
gentleman and a bit of a flunkey. I have never found in America anything
like that feeling common in the mass of English people that prevents the
use of the word "foreigner" for an American; there is nothing to
reciprocate the sympathy and pride that English and Irish republicans
and radicals feel for the States. Few Americans realise that there are
such beings as English republicans.

What has linked Americans with the British hitherto has been very
largely the common language and literature; it is only since the war
began that there seems to have been any appreciable development of
fraternal feeling. And that has been not so much discovery of a mutual
affection as the realisation of a far closer community of essential
thought and purpose than has hitherto been suspected. The Americans,
after thinking the matter out with great frankness and vigour, do
believe that Britain is on the whole fighting against aggression and not
for profit, that she is honestly backing France and Belgium against an
intolerable attack, and that the Hohenzollern Empire is a thing that
needs discrediting and, if possible, destroying in the interests of all
humanity, Germany included.

America has made the surprising discovery that, allowing for their
greater nearness, the British are thinking about these things almost
exactly as Americans think about them. They follow the phases of the war
in Great Britain, the strain, the blunderings, the tenacity, the onset
of conscription in an essentially non-military community, with the
complete understanding of a people similarly circumstanced, differing
only by scale and distance. They have been through something of the sort
already; they may have something of the sort happen again. It had not
occurred to them hitherto how parallel we were. They begin to have
inklings of how much more parallel we may presently become.

There is evidence of a real search for American affinities among the
other peoples of the world; it is a new war-made feature of the
thoughtful literature and journalists of America. And it is interesting
to note how partial and divided these affinities must necessarily be.
Historically and politically, the citizen of the United States must be
drawn most closely to France. France is the one other successful modern
republic; she was the instigator and friend of American liberation. With
Great Britain the tie of language, the tradition of personal freedom,
and the strain in the blood are powerful links. But both France and
Britain are old countries, thickly populated, with a great and ancient
finish and completeness, full of implicit relationships; America is by
comparison crude, uninformed, explicit, a new country, still turning
fresh soil, still turning over but half-explored natural resources.

The United States constitute a modern country, a country on an
unprecedented scale, being organised from the very beginning on modern
lines. There is only one other such country upon the planet, and that
curiously enough is parallel in climate, size, and position--Russia in
Asia. Even Russia in Europe belongs rather to the newness that is
American than to the tradition that is European; Harvard was founded
more than half a century before Petrograd. And when I looked out of the
train window on my way to Petrograd from Germany, the little towns I saw
were like no European towns I had ever seen. The wooden houses, the
broad unmade roads, the traffic, the winter-bitten scenery, a sort of
untidy spaciousness, took my mind instantly to the country one sees in
the back part of New York State as one goes from Boston to Niagara. And
the reality follows the appearance.

The United States and Russia are the west and the east of the same
thing; they are great modern States, developing from the beginning upon
a scale that only railways make possible. France and Britain may perish
in the next two centuries or they may persist, but there can be no doubt
that two centuries ahead Russia and the United States will be two of the
greatest masses of fairly homogeneous population on the globe.

There are no countries with whom the people of the United States are so
likely to develop sympathy and a sense of common values and common
interests as with these three, unless it be with the Scandinavian
peoples. The Scandinavian peoples have developed a tendency to an
extra-European outlook, to look west and east rather than southwardly,
to be pacifist and progressive in a manner essentially American. From
any close sympathy with Germany the Americans are cut off at present by
the Hohenzollerns and the system of ideas that the Hohenzollerns have
imposed upon German thought. So long as the Germans cling to the tawdry
tradition of the Empire, so long as they profess militarism, so long as
they keep up their ridiculous belief in some strange racial superiority
to the rest of mankind, it is absurd to expect any co-operative feeling
between them and any other great people.

The American tradition is based upon the casting off of a Germanic
monarchy; it is its cardinal idea. These sturdy Republicans did not
fling out the Hanoverians and their Hessian troops to prepare the path
of glory for Potsdam. But except for the gash caused by the Teutonic
monarchy, there runs round the whole world a north temperate and
sub-arctic zone of peoples, generally similar in complexion, physical
circumstances, and intellectual and moral quality, having enormous
undeveloped natural resources, and a common interest in keeping the
peace while these natural resources are developed, having also a common
interest in maintaining the integrity of China and preventing her
development into a military power; it is a zone with the clearest
prospect of a vast increase in its already enormous population, and it
speaks in the main one or other of three languages, either French,
Russian, or English. I believe that natural sympathy will march with the
obvious possibilities of the situation in bringing the American mind to
the realisation of this band of common interests and of its
compatibility with the older idea of an American continent protected by
a Monroe doctrine from any possibility of aggression from the monarchies
of the old world.

As the old conception of isolation fades and the American mind accustoms
itself to the new conception of a need of alliances and understandings
to save mankind from the megalomania of races and dynasties, I believe
it will turn first to the idea of keeping the seas with Britain and
France, and then to this still wider idea of an understanding with the
Pledged Allies that will keep the peace of the world.

Now Germany has taught the world several things, and one of the most
important of these lessons is the fact that the destinies of states and
peoples is no longer to be determined by the secret arrangements of
diplomatists and the agreements or jealousies of kings. For fifty years
Germany has been unifying the mind of her people against the world. She
has obsessed them with an evil ideal, but the point we have to note is
that she has succeeded in obsessing them with that ideal. No other
modern country has even attempted such a moral and mental solidarity as
Germany has achieved. And good ideals need, just as much as bad ones,
systematic inculcation, continual open expression and restatement. Mute,
mindless, or demented nations are dangerous and doomed nations. The
great political conceptions that are needed to establish the peace of
the world must become the common property of the mass of intelligent
adults if they are to hold against the political scoundrel, the royal
adventurer, the forensic exploiter, the enemies and scatterers of
mankind. The French, Americans, and English have to realise this
necessity; they have to state a common will and they have to make their
possession by that will understood by the Russian people, and they have
to share that will with the Russian people. Beyond that there lies the
still greater task or making some common system of understandings with
the intellectual masses of China and India. At present, with three of
these four great powers enormously preoccupied with actual warfare,
there is an opportunity for guiding expression on the part of America,
for a real world leadership, such as may never occur again....

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